Description:

• Trees or shrubs, dioecious, evergreen
• Leaves spirally arranged, subopposite or whorled, rarely opposite, linear to narrowly ovate or scale-like, long-persistent
• Male cones usually consisting of many fertile scales, each bearing 2 pollen sacs, axillary, rarely terminal, sessile to shortly stalked, catkin-like, solitary or in groups of 2-5; pollen grains usually with 2 air-bladders or wings
• Female cones axillary, on thin naked stalks or on short leafy or scaly branches, usually reduced to 1 or 2 fertile, terminal scales and a few sterile, lower scales fused with each other and with cone axis; fused cone axis and scales beneath seeds either remain woody or become swollen and often fleshy at maturity (receptacle)
• Ovule solitary, adnate to face of fertile scale, inverted and enclosed in a false aril (epimatium) arising from face of scale and adnate to single integument
• Seeds ellipsoid to globose; testa and false aril form a coriaceous or externally fleshy and internally ± woody shell; embryo axile; cotyledons 2
• x = 13

Classification Notes:

• De Laubenfels (1985) gives a description of infrageneric taxa, but no genus descriptions
• Page (1990) places one southern Africa species: Podocarpus falcatus (Thunb.) R.Br. ex Mirb., in his genus Afrocarpus
• See Leistner et al. (1995) for reasons why only one genus is recognised in this work

Nomenclature:

• Podocarpus L'Hér. ex Pers.
  • Persoon: 580 (1807) name conserved
  • Stapf: 3 (1933)
  • Leistner: 34 (1966)
  • Page: 340 (1990)
  • Von Breitenbach & Von Breitenbach: 133 (1992)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species nearly 100, mainly in montane forest of tropics and subtropics and at lower altitudes in temperate regions mainly in southern hemisphere
• Southern Africa: Species 4, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape